Eugenides,+Jeffrey

=Jeffrey Eugenides= Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960. He attended high school at University Liggett School, and he graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. Eugenides’ first novel, __The Virgin Suicides,__ was published to acclaim in 1993. It has since been translated into fifteen languages and made into a feature film. His next novel, __Middlesex__ (2002), received a Pulitzer Prize. Eugenides has received numerous awards throughout his career, including a Whiting Writers’ award, the Henry D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Today, Eugenides lives in New Jersey with his wife and daughter and is on the faculty of Princeton University’s creative writing program.
 * Biography: **

**His most Famous Works:**

My reaction to the ending of __Middlesex__ was one of immense shock, as well as sadness after observing as Cal is arrested for his raid on the workplace and after learning about the death of Cal and Chapter Eleven’s father. When Cal is released from prison to find his brother, Chapter Eleven, sitting on the wooden bench outside the police station and Chapter Eleven tells Cal about their fathers passing, it was a very touching scene. In addition, I was also very surprised when reading about the events of the funeral, where after 14 years of raising Callie as a girl, Desdemona finally recognizes Cal’s condition, and even associates his condition with stories of children from the village she grew up in that were born of incest and had similar genetical problems. Then, in the form of another shocking confession, Desdemona reveals to Cal that her husband, Lefty, was actually both her third cousin and her brother, which means that Cal’s father Milton was undoubtedly born carrying a gene for some sort of genetic disorder. This helped clarify some of the story for me, as I now understood why there was a greater chance of Calliope being born with a genetic disorder. Finally, one last shocking event that takes place at the end of the novel is when Cal refuses to go into the church for his father’s funeral, but instead stands outside the family doorway in order to assume the male-only role in Greek traditions to keep his father's spirit from re-entering the family home. While it was surprising to me that Cal chose not to go to his father’s funeral, it was also a very significant moment in the transformation from Calliope to Cal. All these events made me feel different things, but in the end, especially by ending the novel with Cal’s final step towards becoming a male, the book made me feel a sense of happiness. While I was devastated by the loss of Cal’s father, the end of the novel made me realize how epic Cal’s overall transformation had been.
 * Reaction Journals:**
 * Middlesex:**

Although the title of the novel __The Virgin Suicides__ seemingly gives away that each of the Lisbon girls would end up committing suicide, I was still very shocked as to how it took place. The lead-up to the climactic scene of Lux, Bonnie, Theresa, and Mary’s suicides is incredibly suspenseful: after the boys finally get the message from the girls that they want to run away with them, I actually had some hope that it would work out for all of them. However, when the boys were waiting in the Lisbon’s deteriorating living room, the girls’ plan came into fruition in my head: while the boys were waiting, each girl would tragically take her own life in a different way: Bonnie by hanging, Theresa by sleeping pills, Lux by asphyxiation, and Mary by sticking her torso in the oven (she would survive for another month or so, but the community considers her as good as dead during that time). In addition to this shock, I also felt slightly angered by the events that took place after the suicides of the girls, especially when the local news reporters begin recounting their lives with vastly incorrect facts about the girls lives. Lastly, I did feel more at peace when Mary finally passes away a month after her original suicide attempt by taking sleeping pills and her and her sisters are finally able to be given a proper burial, since Mary’s death also marks the last day of the cemetery workers’ strike. All of this suspense and anger actually made the book quite compelling, and I would surely recommend it to any prospective reader.
 * The Virgin Suicides:**

Like the novel itself, Jeffrey Eugenides’ process in writing Middlesex can be described in many different ways, but the one word that most prominently comes to mind is this: astonishing. The journey that Eugenides took to write this novel is nothing short of amazing. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993, and Middlesex wasn’t published until nine years later, in 2002. Eugenides published no other material during that time, which means that he spent nine whole years working on this masterpiece of a novel. To the average person, this would seem like an obscenely long amount of time to spend working on one project. But in numerous interviews about his process, Eugenides reveals many of the motives for why he spent so long working on one novel, and also about how he went about doing it. 
 * Review Essay:**

A suicide is an extraordinary event. When someone takes their own life, especially in a tight-knit community, the support for that person’s family by the community takes almost a supernatural form, as people with differences, and sometimes even feuds, who would never band together under normal circumstances, band together in support. The entire community wonders the same question: Why? Why would someone feel the need to take their own life? Why were their demons great enough to overpower all of the great opportunities they would have had in life? In today’s society, this would be the normal reaction of a community to a suicide. However, in his novel The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides uses a mundane setting, a recurring theme of the superficiality of vision, a futile quest for happiness, and the failure of memory in order to illustrate the suicides of 5 sisters in the same year as a normal event.   
 * Critical Analysis:**

Eugenides, Jeffrey. //The Virgin Suicides//. New York, NY: Warner, 1993. Print.
 * Works Cited:**

Foer, Jonathan S. "BOMB Magazine: Jeffrey Eugenides by Jonathan Safran Foer." //BOMB Magazine: Home Page//. Bombsite, Fall 2002. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. .

Moorhem, Bran V. "3am Interview: AN INTERVIEW WITH JEFFREY EUGENIDES, AUTHOR OF THE MIDDLESEX AND THE VIRGIN SUICIDES." //301 Moved Permanently//. 3 A.M. Magazine, 2003. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. .

Robertson, Grant S. "Over the Tree Tops." //Ideationalizing.com//. Oct. 2005. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. .